Pregnancy almost ruined my Olympic dream – Danvers

Tasha Danvers

She walked towards the abortion clinic consumed by confusion and sorrow. And then she sobbed. In those agonised steps towards the entrance, she had a change of heart. Tasha Danvers was going to be a mum. It was, she says, an “emotional nightmare”.

“I could almost touch my dream of becoming an Olympic medallist,” says the 36-year-old former athlete, speaking as part of a BBC Radio 5 live programme on sportswomen and motherhood.

The Londoner was 27 at the time and in her sporting prime, with the 2004 Athens Olympics just months away. Her husband and coach Darrell Smith felt, in Danvers’s words, like a buffoon.

Pregnant athletes have competed at the Olympics, of course. Only last year, Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi was eight months pregnant when she became the first woman to represent Malaysia in Olympic shooting.

Taking aim while seated is one thing. Negotiating the 400m hurdles, with an ever-growing bump, is another.

“When you’re married and getting on with life, it’s no big deal, but as a professional athlete this is not done. You just don’t get pregnant during an Olympic year,” says Danvers.

“I don’t think I felt much excitement. On the one hand, you want to carry on with your dream but, on the other, you’re a married woman and, at the end of the day, the only thing that’s going to last is life.

“I knew that if I went through with the abortion I wouldn’t recover well emotionally and, as an athlete, your whole self needs to be in good shape; emotionally, physically and mentally.

“If I was ruined emotionally, I probably wouldn’t perform well anyway. As hard as it was, I had to do what felt right for me.”

Danvers watched the Olympic opening ceremony from home while her husband attended the glitzy gala in the Greek capital. Once more, she cried.

“My husband continued with his dream of going to the Olympics as a coach and I couldn’t watch any more after that,” she admits.

But there was to be life after motherhood as Danvers went on to become one of a number of athletes to prove that becoming a mum need not be an obstacle to sporting success.

After all, Liz McColgan  had won 10,000m gold at the 1991 World Championships after giving birth to her first child Eilish, while back in 1948 Fanny Blankers-Koen,   a mother of two, won four gold medals for the Netherlands at the London Olympics.

Seven months after the birth of her son Jaden, Danvers finished a confidence-boosting fifth in her first competitive race. A silver at the 2006 Commonwealth Games followed and reaching the final of the World Championships in Osaka a year later lent credence to her belief she could compete with the elite at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

And so, at the age of 30, the Los Angeles-based athlete produced the fastest run of her life in the Chinese capital to win bronze in 53.84 seconds, leaping in “complete and utter joy” after seeing her name below only Jamaican Melanie Walker and American Sheena Tosta on the scoreboard.

But all was not rosy. Danvers and her American husband were divorcing, and although her passion for the sport was “dying out”, she returned to England with London 2012 in her sights.

She set up base in Birmingham to be closer to her family, but the daily grind of combining the school run with a commute to London for training took its toll.

“At Christmas we went back to the US to visit Jaden’s family and he said ‘I want to stay in LA’,” recalls Danvers. “Then I knew it was time for him to go back to the US and I definitely underestimated how that would make me feel. That was the beginning of a major downward spiral.”

The image of her five-year-old son waving goodbye from the back of a taxi as he left for California still haunts Danvers.

Perhaps understandably, depression took hold and on June  23, 2011, heartbroken, blighted by injuries and dependent on anti-depressants, she tried to kill herself.

Danvers, who on Twitter  describes herself as complex, recalls how darkness engulfed her as she drove home from training.

“All of a sudden, I was crying my eyes out. I didn’t know why I was crying,” she says.

“I thought, ‘If I can’t even have a good day without going crazy at some point, I just don’t want to do it any more’.